its matchless efficiency.

We seamen, naval or mercantile, are a stout unmovable breed. Tenacity to
our convictions is deeply rooted. The narrow trends of shipboard life
give licence to a conservatism that out-Herods Herod in intensity,
unreason--in utter sophistry. We extend this atmosphere to our
relationships, to the associations with the beach, with other
sea-services, with other ships--to the absurd pretensions of the other
watch. "A sailorman afore a landsman, an' a shipmate afore all," may be
a useful creed, but it engenders a contentious outlook, an intolerance
difficult to reconcile. In the fo'c'sle, the upholding of a 'last ship'
may lead to a broken nose; aft, the officers may quarrel, wordily, over
the grades of their service; ashore, the captain may only reserve his
confidences for a peer of his tonnage; over all, the distance between
the Naval and Merchants' Services was immeasurable and complete.

If it was so to this date, it was perhaps more intense in the old days
when common seafaring had not set as broad a distinction, as widely
divergent a sea-practice, as our modern services shew. That such a
contentious atmosphere existed we have ample witness. After experience
as a merchants' man, Nelson wrote of his re-entry. "I returned a
practical seaman with a horror of the Royal Navy. . . . It was many
weeks before I got the least reconciled to a man-o'-war, so deep was the
prejudice rooted!" We have no such noted record of a merchant seaman
re-entering from the Navy. Doubtless the laxity and indiscipline he
might observe would produce a not dissimilar revulsion.

In the years that have elapsed since Nelson wrote, we have had few
opportunities to compose our differences, to get on better terms with
one another. The course of naval development took the great war fleets
hull down on our commercial horizon, beyond casual intercommunication.
On rare and widely separated occasions we fell into an expedition
together, but the unchallenged power of the naval forces only served to
heighten the barriers that stood between us. At the Crimea, in India, on
the Chinese and Egyptian expeditions, during the Boer War, we were
important links in the venture, but no more important than the cargoes
we ferried. There was no call for any service other than our usual
sea-work. The Navy saw to it that our comings and goings were
unmolested. We were sea-civilians, purely and simply; there was nothing
more to be said about it.